SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook has fired a security engineer who bragged to a woman he met on Tinder that his job at Facebook made him a “professional stalker” and that he’d been able to find out a lot about her.

“We have zero tolerance for people abusing these policies and we fire anyone who violates them,” Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos said in a statement.

The alleged stalking incident was made public last week by Jackie Stokes, founder of Spyglass Security, in a series of Twitter posts, then first reported by the tech Web site Motherboard.

Stokes’ tweets indicated that the woman, a software engineer, had told her the male Facebook employee had uncovered relatively difficult-to-find information about her, though it was not clear if any of it came from accessing Facebook data.

Stamos said Facebook has policies around how its employees can access and use data about Facebook users and that it also verifies how sensitive information is used, including logging access requests and using automated systems designed to detect and prevent abuse.

The problem may be wider than just one engineer, however. On Wednesday Motherboard reported that former Facebook workers had told it of multiple employees and contractors fired for abusing access to user data. In some cases that included stalking exes.

Motherboard did not publish the names of making those accusations, citing Facebook's non-disclosure agreements. Facebook declined comment on that latest report.

Facebook is trying to regain the trust of its 2.2 billion users after it admitted a political ad targeting firm may have obtained information on up to 87 million users ahead of the 2016 White House race, without their consent. The firm and the developer that initially obtained the personal information have said they did nothing wrong and have been made a scapegoat by Facebook.